Both. storage is far far more. And drawers are easier.

The drawer box needs to be tall and not short like you have on roll outs. You can get much more in them and it is very easy to access stuff in the back. If you have pull out drawers with low sides you might as well do doors and shelves. My in laws had low pullouts in their uppers (they were 24" deep but that's a whole other thing) and they didn't stack things very high since stuff would dump over.

That said I do have 2 areas where the base cabinets do not have drawers. First is on the island since the cabinet is only 18" deep. And the second place is to the right of my stove top. It is 24" with one drawer and then a door. I have a shelf up high for my 2 burner skillet and then a pot rack on the bottom to hold my skillets.

Mostly a, but a littl bit b because you can use the back as easily as the front. I USE the space in the back of my drawers. If they were doors, the stuff in the back would be stuff I didn't use and probably forgot I had.

I certainly understand the reasoning. But for me, I don't like the look of an all drawers kitchen.

Thank you for the responses so far. I'm really very interested in what people think on this.

I find drawers much more convenient to use but don’t find they hold more. As an example, my current kitchen has a 36” drawer base I use for pots and pans. In the previous kitchen, they were in a 36” cabinet under a cooktop ( so no drawer). I had to leave several pans out as there wasn’t room. Same brand and type of cabinet. I prefer the drawers even with a little less room as nothing gets lost in the back. Since drawers are always smaller than the cabinet that contains them, basic math says they can’t hold as much (length x width x height = volume). Drawers just “ live larger”.

Love drawers for their ease of use. I also like the look of them too. There’s a recent post (I forget OP’s name, sorry) about updating a 1940s kitchen. It shows tons of drawers, original I’m assuming. I loved it! My previous home had lots of drawers, but mostly regular cabinets. My frequently used items lived in those drawers. My current home… blah. The only thing I even remotely like are the 2 large drawers in an otherwise useless kitchen.

With a door and two shelves the front 12" is accessible. Behind that you have to move things to get what you want. A full extension drawer easily allows you to remove anything quickly.

My response from a recent similar post:

I design with both drawers and ROTs in base cabinets. I include ROTs almost exclusively in full-height door cabinets and they are included specifically for small appliances or heavy bowls. I believe that heavier appliances like crockpots and mixers are easier to maneuver out of a pulled out shallow ROT and there is less risk of damage to a drawer front from moving these appliances in and out. It's easier to view and sort stacked items in a shallow ROT. I like that you can adjust the height to your specific storage needs to maximize the capacity of the cabinet. I also think aesthetically it looks better to break up some of the drawer fronts with full-height cabinet doors.

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Storage, without a doubt. Drawers offer far more efficient space.

Did a experiment/test with a friend who was designing her kitchen. She boxed up and brought over contents of 2 of her cabinets to try out storage using my drawers. She was amazed to find there was space left over in my drawers.

In an absolute sense, you probably do lose cubic feet of storage if you're doing a stack of drawers vs. a single door. But I agree that it's more useful storage--we had a mix in our old kitchen and have almost all drawers now, and don't miss the doors at all. The one thing we have an issue with is our stand mixer, which is on the counter right now but which we'd like to put in a cabinet, so we may add a single door cabinet to an area that we're adding cabinetry to. But otherwise, I really love the drawers. (We keep almost everything in drawers--plates, pots, etc.--and a decade+ in, it's hard to imagine going back at this point.)

I put less/rarely used appliances (e.g., instapot, toaster, mixer, electric teapot) in upper cabinets. While they'd fit in drawers, don't want to waste drawer space on them.

@Kristin Petro Interiors, Inc.'s post is exactly how I feel. I have mostly drawers, but I do have one large ROTS cabinet. My blender is in there, and a few other things that seem to fit it better than they would in drawers. I also like breaking up the appearance of so many drawers with a more vertical door in the base cabinetry. To have both types of base cabinets - drawers and ROTS - is the best of both worlds IMHO.

I went with drawers both for convenience / storage but also because I have a few friends with damaged lower doors from having roll-outs and impatient kids/spouses/self - I didn't want that.

I have a mix of drawers and roll-outs, and I am happy with that arrangement. I do agree about using the entirely of the drawer for storage, but I keep pots and pans, baking sheets, mixing bowls, and cutting boards in the roll-outs, so nothing gets lost in there, I know what's in there and where it all is.

Just my opinion... drawers are easier to use but are aesthitcally limited. Pullouts behind doors offer more, and possibly better, storage because they don't have any adherence to aesthetics.

There are tall pullouts, which are really just drawers. The Blum system and its clones are set up to convert any drawer to a pullout by using different mounting holes. The advantage of pullouts is that they can be mounted in any configuration desired. You can have a tall top pullout over four short pullouts, and place them right next to a cabinet with three short pullouts over two tall pullouts.

If the cabinets are predrilled with shelf pin holes, pullouts can be adjusted when you find the ergonomics unpleasant. However, you will always have to open a door to access them.

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My shop cabinets have pullouts because they are so efficient for that type of organized storage. My kitchen cabinets are mostly drawers because the two steps to access a pullout is annoying and thus drawers are worth the storage loss.

Storage first, and convenience second. I went from all cupboards with pull outs to almost all drawers. I can see and USE everything in the drawer very easily! I didn’t use the things in the back of my cupboards previously unless I had no choice. Now things are in the back of my drawers because that’s where they fit nicely, not because I don’t care if I use them often. And after 6 months in my new kitchen I wouldn’t return to cupboards.

I recommend cataloging most of the stuff you want in your lower cabinets and being sure you plan for it. You might need to store a few tall items and that is where drawers can fail you.

Yes. By which I mean: Both.

My drawers consist of all usable space within their footprint (width side-to-side x depth front-to-back), minus the thickness of the drawers on each side. If I had doors instead of drawers, I would not be able to maximize my storage that way. I can only use all of the space because I have full extension drawers. (Yes, you could use full extension pullouts inside doors, but then you lose additional space for the pullout sides to clear the doors - plus you make accessing stuff a 2-step process.) For example, my 33" wide drawers are 14" tall and are filled with cast iron skillets left-to-right and lids at the front of the drawer. Peg-style dividers keep everything standing upright.

And it is much more convenient. Even my 33" and 42" wide drawers have only a single long handle, so I can open them with one hand. Soft-close slides allow me to close each drawer with a single touch (with a hand, foot, hip, whatever's handy!).

It’s convenience for me. We put drawers in during our kitchen renovation about 5 years ago and I’d never go back to doors. No more getting down on my hands and knees to pull stuff off the front of the lowest shelf, then feel around the back of the shelf to find the springform pan, then put all the front stuff back in again. Repeat when I’m ready to put the springform pan away again. Now I just open the drawer, pull out the springform pan, and away we go!

Drawers, so much easier!